Larry's Party

by Carol Shields

  But it’s boring down there in the depths, and he senses that even his patient Beth has had enough. When was the last time she asked him how “it” was going? Maybe in the future she’ll look back and resent all the energy she put into their supine bedtime conversations, cheering him out of his glooms, offering narratives from her vast storehouse, trying to patch him up and put his psyche in working order again. What dullness. Besides, she’s busy preparing a lecture on the virgin saints, Cecilia, Margaret, Agatha, Mahya, Dorothy; virginity is strength, she intends to prove, a part of the body held in reserve, which must be seen not as passivity, but as the mask of a potent power over the self. She has it all worked out.

  What do you do with private disappointment, Larry wonders. How do you fix it? He can’t explain, not even to himself, but he’s forgotten those things he used to take on trust, love’s careless ease or lethargy, drowning in ordinary contentment. There’s been a falling off of faith, which he presumes is temporary. Sooner or later a restoration will present itself, he feels sure of that - but when will it come?

  Yet even in the midst of his present confusion he knows with certainty that the important conversations of his life will always be with women.

  Tenderly, smilingly, he remembers Vivian Bondurant. Viv of the clear brown eyes and capable hands. They’d worked together at Flowerfolks for years back in the seventies, and the two of them had talked all day long. Their talk had been unstructured, loose, and capable of sustaining interruptions and uneven silences. She’d taught him, a tongue-tied kid just out of school, to open his mouth. He hasn’t seen her in years. She’d be what? - forty-seven now. Almost fifty. Christ.

  He and Dorrie hadn’t known how to talk. No one had told them how it was with married people, how much they need space to let out the low, continuous rumble of their thoughts. The two of them exchanged consumer information; that’s what he remembers anyway. They quarreled about trivialities, about hurt feelings, about money and in-laws, just as though they’d learned these topics of discord from reading Ann Landers. Mostly, especially toward the end, they were silent - though a part of Larry has come to believe that their silence held a sinewy richness of its own.

  Right away it was different with Beth. Lying in the dark bedroom, their arms around each other, they’ll talk for an hour or more before falling asleep, and Larry feels gladness swarming in his ears. Such ease, such unlooked-for happiness. One night in early October, the wind banging the north side of the house, Larry tells his wife about Laura Latimer Moorhouse’s visit. Beth resettles her white limbs and murmurs into his ear: No! That’s awful! And then what? Oh, Larry. Now she is wondering, aloud, what will happen to a world that’s lost its connection with the sacred. We long for ecstasy, to stand outside of the self in order to transcend that self, but how do we get there?

  Her tone is only mildly speculative. She has only to push the words out as her thoughts form, easy as air, exhaling against the blanket binding, against Larry’s chest. Larry imagines the vibrations of her voice entering the wallpaper, passing straight through the retrofitted drywall, the ancient lath and brick, and traveling into black space and becoming flecks in the earth’s vitreous humor.

  And then he recalls, as he often does, lying in his boyhood bed and hearing through the plaster the sound of his parents talking in the next room. Their night noises, their bed talk. The woody rasp as they cleared their human throats or blew their noses. Sometimes it went on and on. The words were inaudible, a low, buzzing, reverberative music whose content, to their son Larry at least, was unguessable. First his mother, then his father, back and forth like a kind of weaving. There would be a pause, and then the murmurous resonance resumed. He would fall asleep, finally, to the rhythm of those strange voices: Stu and Dot Weller, his silent parents, coming awake in the soundwaves of their own muffled words, made graceful by what they chose to say in the long darkness.

  Larry’s busy these November days with the Latimer project, and he welcomes being busy, sensing that his freakish profession is the only thing that keeps him from disappearing; it also quietens the late millennial despair that drifts about the world these days, singing a version of: here we go again, and again, and again. He’s done a preliminary set of drawings, thinking as he works how happiness lurks between the hand and the eye, and between the objective design and the abstractions that bloom in his head. A small untended space, but critical. Last week he drove up to Milwaukee and made a presentation to the hospital board.

  A round of applause greeted his short talk, and the chair of the board expressed regret that wonderful Laura had not lived to see her dream realized, not even in blueprint form, but nevertheless, ahem, a worthy project was well and truly launched, and the necessary funding was solidly in place. Larry got the green light. He was to begin at once.

  The winter would be taken up with planning and subcontracting, and by April the first hedges will be in place. He’s decided on a combination of barberry, for its orange-red autumn foliage, and cornelian cherry, which takes well to formal shearing. A good June and July should double their growth in the first year, and by August - by August! And then a dazzling thought comes at him sideways - by August he will be forty-one! No longer forty, with forty’s clumsy, abject round shoulders and sting of regret, but forty-one! A decent age, a mild, assured, wise and good-hearted manly age.

  The number forty-one redoubles in Larry’s head like a balloon of sweetness, which he shakes off roughly, as if it were a piece of foolishness he will not stoop one inch to acknowledge.

  In the center of the Milwaukee maze he has designed a number of topiary figures grouped around a mirrored wishing-well, where children will be able to toss their pennies and whisper their deepest desires. To get better. To live. To grow up. To be like everyone else. Isn’t that what we all want in the end?

  The maze itself has a single entrance, but four exits, one in each corner. Why four? Most mazes have only one exit or perhaps two, but Larry, for the first time in his life, and for reasons he has not, so far, bothered to articulate before the hospital board, has designed a maze in which there is not the slightest possibility of getting seriously lost.

  As for himself, he’s persuaded that he’s only been pretending to be lost at forty, a man on the verge of nothing at all. He’s been rehearsing the condition, trying it on for size, as if he could with his sham despair propitiate the real thing - which will come, which will surely come. The arrow is already in flight, he knows that much.

  For the moment, though, he’s safe. A tide of balance has miraculously returned, and he’s back to being Larry Weller again, husband, father, home owner, tuxedo wearer. An okay guy with work to do. So far, so good.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Larry’s Kid 1991

  Three times a year Larry Weller drives out to O’Hare International to meet his son’s plane; Ryan is twelve now, almost thirteen, and he’s been making these solo trips from Winnipeg to Chicago since he was eight: — for spring vacation, for a month in the summer, and for a few days at Christmas.

  Winnipeg lies at the dark curved end of the world, a world of snow, ice, and the imponderables of Mounted Police and paradise fishing and a socialist health plan - that’s what Larry’s Chicago friends think, but Larry knows better. It’s a place much like any other. A medium-sized city, bustling, thriving, standing at the junction of two rivers, the wide Red, and the sinuous, somehow womanly, Assiniboine. Winnipeg is the place where Ryan was born almost thirteen years ago - a sunny day in late August, three-thirty in the afternoon, the Grace Hospital, an easy birth - and Winnipeg’s the only place he’s ever lived.

  The boy’s visits to Chicago are stressful for all concerned. Larry’s second wife, Beth, a socially able and graceful woman in her mid-thirties who teaches a course in women’s studies at Rosary College, is surprisingly awkward around children. Childless by choice, she is also the only child of elderly parents. With Ryan, she takes a Beatrix Potter approach one minute, tender and cosseting, concerned about what he eat
s, whether he’s watching too much TV or getting enough sleep, then swerves erratically into a gear of cranked-up intimacy. She grins in his direction, even though she’s not a grinning woman, and maintains the fiction that there is always a joke on the boil or a banana skin underfoot. The wrong words fall out of her lovely mouth, the wrong suggestions, and even her body, the easy, slender, shrugging body that Larry adores, tends to lurch forward and then collapse when Ryan’s around; how do you hug a twelve-year-old boy? Perhaps you don’t hug him at all. It’s probably better, Beth’s decided, to leave the hugging to Larry who is, after all, Ryan’s blood parent. This summer she greeted her stepson with her broadest grin (Hi there, partner) and a vigorous downward-pumping handshake, a single deterrnined-to-get-it-over-with gesture. She’s noticed that the boy’s hands are always sticky, and she’s mentioned this to Larry two or three times. Is this sticky-hands thing something children have or is it just Ryan? Excessive sweat glands or poor hygiene? And he’s so quiet.

  “He’s not really quiet,” Larry says. “It’s just that he doesn’t know what we expect from him.”

  “Well, what do we expect?” They’ve been over this ground before, but still she asks. Her voice at such times takes on a folk-singer’s deep quaver.

  “The impossible.”

  “Which is - ?” Her stepmother’s pale distress.

  “That he just act like a kid. Our kid. One of the family, one of us.”

  “I get it, okay, I get it. You mean he’s supposed to relate to us without thinking about relating to us.”

  “That and, well, the other thing.”

  “What other thing?”

  “The fact that when he was a tiny kid he was abandoned more or less. Remember, I was the one who walked out the door — at least that’s how it must look from his point of view -”

  “And there’s also the fact that you’ve taken yourself a new wifie.”

  He stared at her; the word wifie felt false; he wondered what she was getting at, what kind of mood she was working up to. “All of that,” he said finally.

  “No wonder he’s quiet.” Beth’s voice sheared off into a sympathetic sigh. “He must be always thinking, thinking, thinking. About what a raw deal he’s been given, the poor kid.”

  “At least he’s had some stability. Dorrie always -”

  “When did you say he goes back to Winnipeg?”

  “The twenty-second.”

  “That’s ten more days!”

  “I know.”

  As a landscape designer with projects across North America, Larry does quite a bit of traveling, and he often sees divorce kids on planes. They’re easy to spot. The flight attendant settles them in window seats and supplies them with crayons or puzzles before take-off, leaning over and speaking to them quietly as though to compensate for the emotional noise they’ve already suffered in their short lives. These children are clean and quietly dressed for the most part, with brushed hair, and faces that wear the fixed breakable expression of accustomed but uneasy travelers. Nevertheless, they manage, despite their youth and anxiety, despite the brutalities they’ve undoubtedly survived, to project a sense of earnest sociability. They’ve done the trip before. A whole lot of times. Mom’s in Texas. Dad’s in Toronto. Or the other way around. No, they never get air sick (this said in prideful, yet shyly confessional tones). They’ve been to Disneyland twice. They’ve seen the Blue Jays play. They’re pretty good in math, especially since Mom’s boyfriend’s been coaching them in division. As for Dad’s girlfriend ...

  It tears at Larry’s heart. It half kills him!

  O’Hare International Airport is a giant puzzle, with its various color-coded terminals, its concourses, its hundreds of gates - an immense sorting machine for the savvy, and a bafflement to strangers. Travelers emerge blinking at the exit doors, their luggage miraculously in hand, scarcely able to believe they’ve worked their way out to the benign freshness of the rooted world. Disabled passengers and young children are promised escort service by their respective airlines, but Larry, waiting anxiously for Ryan to emerge, always worries that these arrangements will break down. It did happen once, two years ago when Ryan was ten. Disembarking, the boy had found himself suddenly alone.

  He’d reacted, though, in a surprisingly calm manner for a kid his age, asking directions as he moved along the wide connecting corridors, finding his way from point to point. His hair had been sharply barbered for the summer vacation, and Larry, catching sight of him at last, came close to weeping: his son’s pale Canadian face, the fragile shape of his skull exposed to the world, and the boy’s small, hony body clad in shorts and T-shirt and dwarfed by the size of his canvas backpack. Were those tears in Ryan’s eyes? - Larry couldn’t be sure. The searing brightness in his glance of recognition could mean anything.

  For Larry it’s always the same when he meets Ryan at the airport. The anxiety of finding him in the crowd, then the drowning relief of his actual presence, then trying to catch his eye - yes, there he is, bewildered but waving dreamily in the distance. Safe. They move toward each other, and a moment later hug awkwardly, Larry bending down to fit his arms around the boy’s rib-cage, Ryan uncertain about his role in this embrace, their two mismatched male bodies trying to come together, trying to prove something important to those others who surround them. One or two seconds of actual collision are all they can manage - Oh Christ, the fakery of it - then a rough pat-pat on the shoulder. Hi there, fella. Yes, well -

  This is the way it’s done, isn’t it? This is how other people do it.

  Larry’s first sight of Ryan is inevitably blurred by the superimposed image of the boy’s mother, Dorrie. That name shimmers in the air, as distorting as a wave of heat, the face of his ex, and Dorrie’s wiry body too, turning and bending, coping with what the world’s dumped on her head, what he’s dumped on her head. It’s she, Dorrie, who sanctioned this child’s cruel haircut. It’s she, a thousand miles away in Winnipeg, who strapped him into his backpack at the crack of dawn, a backpack stuffed and weighted with matched socks rolled into balls tight as bombs. She’s checked and double-checked the child’s clean, folded underwear, the shirts and pants, a warm jacket in case the weather turns, a brand-knew toothbrush in a hygienic case — she’s done it all; every atom of effort is hers. And see those metal bands on the poor kid’s teeth. It was Dorrie, making inquiries, asking around, who found a competent orthodontist who wasn’t out to rob her; she’s the one who sits in the orange-and-beige waiting room thumbing through ancient magazines and Bible stories from a South African press while Ryan is put through the monthly torture of having his braces tightened. She’ll buy him an ice-cream cone afterwards. And maybe rent a video to watch while they eat dinner, just the two of them relaxing over warmed-up lasagna, Ryan’s favorite, and easy on the teeth and gums, too. Quiet. Peace. An evening like a thousand other evenings.

  “So how’s your mom?” Larry always asks on the drive to the house in Oak Park. This is his first real question.

  “Okay,” Ryan says.

  In the summer of 1987 Ryan stayed on an extra week in Chicago. “I hope that’s okay,” Dorrie said to Larry on the phone from Winnipeg. “I have this chance to go to London and it’s one of those eight-day bargains.”

  “Hey, that’s great.” His upgraded voice.

  “You’re sure Beth won’t mind?” She pronounces the name of Larry’s new wife with measured tact. Beth, she says, filling the word with blown air.

  “Beth loves having Ryan around.”

  This wasn’t quite true, but it wasn’t untrue either. Ryan made Beth edgy, unsure of herself, that was all.

  “So is this a business trip kind of thing?” Larry asked his ex-wife over the phone. Dorrie had a knack for sales - and had worked her way up to the vice-presidency of a large and expanding sportswear manufacturer. It could be they were thinking of going international.

  “More of a holiday,” Dorrie said. Then she added socially, “I haven’t been across the pond since our honeymoon. How
’bout that! 1978.”

  “That’s right,” Larry said. He wondered if she was traveling alone but was careful not to ask.

  “I’m going to be staying with a friend,” she said then. “And I got to thinking that you really ought to have the address. Just in case, you know, something happens. Ryan’s allergies acting up or something. Peanuts. He can’t go near peanuts in any form.”

  “I know,” Larry said.

  “You have to watch out for peanut oil in particular. It’s everywhere.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s had these two emergencies—”

  “I know.”

  “ — and I just wanted you to be able to reach me—”

  “That’s a terrific idea,” said Larry, who inevitably finds himself full of bloated compliments when talking to his ex. “I’ll grab a pencil.”

  “It’s number 7 Wellfleet Road. Hampstead. That’s north of London or maybe it’s a part of it, I’m not sure. Care of David Ellingwood.” She spelled out Ellingwood carefully and rattled off a telephone number.

  David Ellingwood. Larry wrote it down. Noisy heartbeats filled his chest, and his fingers burned at their pulse points. David Ellingwood. As far as he knew Dorrie hadn’t had a serious relationship since the divorce.

  “He’s got an answering machine. In case we’re out or something.”

  In case they’re out. Dorrie and this man called David Ellingwood. Out! The phone sweated in his hand.